Author Archives: Kevin M. Lerner
Marist College communication senior capstone projects
Marist College students know what “capping” is. When I began teaching in the Department of Communication, it took me a while to get used to that awkward gerund, but it’s second nature to me now that I have a few of them under my belt. Capping is the senior capstone project, a place where students […]
The day that Christopher Hitchens smoked a cigarette in my J-school classroom
I’m sad to hear of the death of Christopher Hitchens this evening, since we’ll have no more of his cantankerous essays, though I’m not sad for him. He wouldn’t want any of us to be, since as he saw it, he would just be ceasing to exist today. I think it’s probably not inappropriate, and […]
“It only takes 20 minutes to shift the blame,” but far more than two months to establish the truth
Two months and a bit ago, I wrote a piece trying to analyze the two web write-throughs of the New York Times coverage of the NYPD arrests of hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge. Someone—and I still don’t know for certain who—took screen captures of these two versions of the story, […]
Knight Foundation funds ten academic applications of News Challenge projects
The only place I could find this interesting news was in my email, and on page 15 of the pdf version of the AEJMC newsletter. But I thought that this news was important, and since I couldn’t link to it otherwise, I’m posting it here. This is a great way to get innovative reporting projects […]
“It only takes 20 minutes to shift the blame,” and only a screen grab to implicate the Times
There is an image making the rounds on Facebook right now, an annotated dual screen capture of the New York Times front page story on the Brooklyn Bridge arrests that were the dramatic high point of the Occupy Wall Street protests over the weekend. The left side of the image shows a screen capture taken […]
The night that Sarah Jessica Parker stepped on my foot and the world changed
Correction appended: Where I say “Kenneth Cole,” I mean Marc Jacobs. Memory fails ten years on. Thanks to Kelly Crow herself for fact checking me. ––– Ten years ago today, September 10, 2001, my friend Kelly Crow had invited me to be her plus one at the Kenneth Cole fashion show. Kelly was working as […]
The Wall Street Journal tells itself its 9/11 story
According to an internal memo sent out this morning, the Wall Street Journal is planning on having a gathering on Monday, September 12 to commemorate the paper’s coverage of the 9/11 attacks. At the time, the Journal had not yet moved to its current home in the News Corp building on 6th Avenue in Midtown […]
Intellectual Heft: A.J. Liebling as a Critic of Anti-Intellectualism in American Journalism
I will be attending the AEJMC annual conference this week in St. Louis. If you’re going to be there, drop by the History Division poster session on Wednesday at 3:15 p.m. This is the abstract for my paper: One aspect of A.J. Liebling’s tenure as the press critic for The New Yorker that has not […]
The profile of Rupert Murdoch that Rupert Murdoch killed
Rupert Murdoch had already been living in New York for three years before most of the city’s journalism establishment cared much about who he was. Sure, he owned a few papers around the country, and he was known for having turned The News of the World from a winkingly naughty paper that hid behind a […]
Press criticism should be personal, not institutional
In one of his many masterful essays of clear thinking and lucid prose, the late journalism and media scholar Jim Carey wrote: It is a remarkable fact that each year most of us read more words by a reporter such as Homer Bigart of the New York Times than we do of Plato and yet […]
Press Criticism 